LIFE IN THE MORONARCHY

Listening to the delicate notes of Mary Jane Leach’s ‘Celestial Fires’ as I write this, I am struck by an overwhelming fact.  Besieged on all sides by the white noise of the Brexit row it seems inescapable that the national circus that is the political leadership of the UK has become the cracked mirror in which we see ourselves as we really are, the dispossessed peasantry of history, lacking attention to the other, mired in prejudice and fatally blind to the nuances of the ‘issues’.

A sinking ship of fools without destination or means of navigation.  If, as is said, you get the leaders you deserve then we are living not in a democracy but a moronarchy.  A population of morons living in the hazardous chaos of a school playground surveilled and controlled by moronic bullies, jobsworths, sausage machine maintenance workers, and thechnocratic wall-measurers.
The country seems reduced to a nation of dunces bereft of education, attention span and the most basic interpersonal courtesy.

The online conversation has become an offensive tirade of vile abuse.  The Press parrot black and white narratives without hint of complexity or possibility of collective resolution.  The TV is a  concatenation of idiocy upon stilts.  The radio spews the views of tinpot wannabe dictators and ambitious chancers.  We are paralysed in ludicrous certainties at the very time in history that demands flow, creativity, applied intelligence and humanity and the call of the new.  At the very time when kindness and tolerance and compassion needs to be present in the national debate we descend into the spouting of propaganda, intolerance and hate.

It is in the boiling rage of such times that evil does its work so effectively.  The reductionism of the many to the one.  Emotions trumping intellect.  The vapid simplicities of unshakeable certainty.
Strange is it not, that the question ’Shall the UK leave the European Union?’ should open such a sea of division?  Is it not the simplest of questions with a simple yes or no answer?  The prime instigating moron in the circus was the toff, David Cameron, appeasing the rabid streak in the Tory Party that hates all that is foreign or different whether of colour, belief, or identity.  A grouping that sits comfortably with its own self entitlement while denying the very air to the proletariat, the worker, the non-gendered, the sick and the mentally troubled.  A collective that shops happily at Harrods while queues form outside food banks.  And indeed all our representatives seem happy to claim expenses for everything from books of stamps to housing allowances while Universal Credit mires millions in the myriad humiliations of poverty.
‘Build it and they will come’ it is said.  It has been built, but no one has come.  It is long past time when the hero with whichever one of his or her thousand faces must come.  Is it Jeremy or Greta or Caroline?

To understand why we are experiencing this disaster we need to look just below the surface of things.  That bubbling cauldron of the Id where lurks the unconscious drives that lead implacably to violence and hate and where too the compulsion of collective atomisation gives way to the notion of identity or death. If this current process looks like a a conference of hyper-vigilant children in a Lord of the Flies type clusterfuck, it’s because that’s precisely what it is.

Like children denied love and attentive care we have all frozen into attachment disorder.  We cling to simple solutions because we are scared.  We embrace moronic certainties and the pedlars of such illusions because all around the sand shifts chaotically.  We are in a constant state of Fear!
Fear is a highly contagious disease for which the only remedy is Love.

And dear reader, is there anything more lacking from our national conversation right now at this historical pivot than love?  And has there ever been a time when it is more needed?

Vote for the Love Party in the European elections.  Vote for Love in the Local Elections, the General Election coming down the tracks (Yes Boris that means bye-bye with thanks for the albeit brief horrors you are about to visit upon us!)
And vote for Love in the International Election! (It's a bit in the future.  IF there is one!)